The past 100 days have been just fine and dandy if your name happens to be Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, III. He's wearing the mantel of authority quite comfortably, thank you. From The Daily Beast, “President Sessions’ First 100 Days.”
In the last 100 days, everyone else has disappointed. House Speaker Paul Ryan couldn’t get his House conference to repeal Obamacare. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley exchanged friendly fire on the Sunday shows over what exactly the administration wanted to do in Syria. Gary Cohn, Jared Kushner, Steve Mnuchin, and the rest of the Goldman gang have undercut Trump’s populist bona fides and reportedly muscled out the White House’s most ideological senior staff. Mike Flynn got axed, K.T. McFarland got shipped to Singapore, and Betsy DeVos—well, she’s trying.
But as bedlam has unfolded at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., six blocks east in a quiet office on the fifth floor of the imposing Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building, Sessions has busily kept Trump’s campaign promises for him. The attorney general is prioritizing immigration prosecutions, delighting police unions, perusing the border to warn would-be undocumented immigrants to stay away, and rolling back the Justice Department’s litigation against voter-ID laws.
He generated extraordinary opposition from the moment his nomination was announced, with Democrats and civil-rights activists ripping into his stances on immigration, policing, and voting rights. A back-bench Democratic congressman recently called him “a racist and a liar,” and one of his Senate colleagues, Cory Booker, took the unprecedented step of testifying against him at his confirmation hearing. None of that has slowed Sessions.
“I think he’s one of the most successful individuals in Washington right now,” said John Ashcroft, George W. Bush’s first attorney general. “It’s an agenda which he helped shape in the campaign and it’s an agenda with which he’s very comfortable.”
Jeff Sessions is the ideological lodestar, guiding the administration in the path that Trump is far too disorganized or bumbling to go on his own. His recent exchange with the "back bench Democratic congressman” Rep. Lieu, (D-33-CA) was noteworthy. The Hill reports:
Earlier this week, Sessions said he was “amazed” that a judge “sitting on an island in the Pacific” could halt President Trump’s travel ban on people from six predominantly Muslim countries entering the U.S.
"We've got cases moving in the very, very liberal 9th Circuit, who — they've been hostile to the order," Sessions said in comments that drew considerable backlash.
But Sessions dismissed criticism of his comments on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, saying, “Nobody has a sense of humor anymore.”
Lieu fired back at Sessions on Twitter, calling him “a racist and a liar.”
“Actually, just joking. Oh wait, your record shows you are a racist and a liar,” Lieu tweeted.
There's an old saying, "The Devil that you know is better than the Devil that you don't know." Sessions is clearly the devil that we know, and the NAACP knows him better than anybody. More from Daily Beast:
“He’s been a very consistent voice in opposition to any number of civil-rights issues,” said Sherrilyn Ifill, the president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. “No one can say that they didn’t know who he was.”“There’s a heightened consciousness about what he represents, about this administration and where it stands on civil rights, and as a result we have calls like never before, support like we haven’t seen in a very long time,” she added. “We are inundated with offers of people saying, ‘How can I help?’”
On policing in particular, Sessions is poised to undercut much of President Obama’s legacy. During Obama’s presidency, the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department investigated a host of police departments for civil-rights violations and then negotiated court-enforced agreements—called consent decrees—with them. Civil-rights advocates cheered that effort as the only way the federal government could effectively pressure troubled departments to embrace reform.
But many conservatives and police unions said the agreements were meddlesome federal overreach and only served to discourage police officers. Sessions shares those concerns and has ordered staff to review all current and pending consent decrees with an eye to making changes that could boost officer morale. Civil-rights advocates have ripped Sessions’s decision.
“He is picking and choosing which laws he intends to enforce,” said Ifill. “The impact is that those of us who do this work are stepping up and having to expend our resources to fill in and stand strong where the DOJ has failed to enforce civil-rights laws.”
Sessions stands for white supremacy and for dominionism replacing secular government.Those are the big ticket items in Sessions and Bannon’s future political dreamscape. In the meantime, Sessions deals with de-railing pesky matters like the fact that The Washington post reported Sessions’ unreported meetings with the Russian ambassador. “That didn’t appear to slow Sessions down. Instead, he’s moved with inexorable efficiency to advance Trump’s agenda. While Congress dithers and Cabinet secretaries argue among themselves, the attorney general has used his extraordinary power as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer to start dismantling Obama’s signature endeavors—impervious, thus far, to extraordinary levels of outside criticism.”
“The dogs may bark,” Ashcroft said, “but the caravan moves on.”